The Secret Garden — Marrakesh

December 2024. I am in Morocco to begin exploring water in Fez when a close friend of many years invites me to spend a week in this beautiful city at the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, just before the holidays.
She suggests a number of places to visit, among them Le Jardin Secret, located in the heart of the Medina.

It is a place visited by thousands of people every day. I queue, pay the entrance fee, and my attention is caught by the jet of a fountain at the foot of the steps leading to the first patio, before the outer garden.
I have no particular reason to take photographs there — it’s right along the passageway to the gardens — yet my intuition insists, and I listen.

I could not yet imagine the scale of the adventure I was about to enter. I take my first shots and very quickly slip into a kind of time-space bubble. In a few hours, I take more than 300 photographs of that same jet of water. The way the sunlight enters this place keeps changing completely, and I am totally absorbed by the infinite variations in the form and texture of the fountain’s spray.

I barely think of drinking or eating, taking only a short break on the terrace at the back of the garden before returning to edit the harvest from this improvised session. I haven’t even taken the time to explore the rest of these beautifully designed spaces.

What appears to me as I go through the images is beyond comprehension — so much so that I return every day that week, editing several hundred photographs, each more astonishing than the last.
On the eve of my departure, I realise how shockingly impolite I must have seemed to my host, so completely absorbed was I in this place, as if nothing else existed.

(Forgive my passion, please, dear friend B.)